Treating sequences of items together, and question about camera memory card

[evennewerbie]

It is often needed to treat together a sequence of folders or files within a folder. Commonly for example for moving them or deleting them. You are supposed to highlight the first item, then holding down the Capitals key click on the last item, (On Mac alternately to Caps you can use Command). I seem to have often had difficulty in doing this.

Akthough I can't quite remember exactly what I was doing. I have often had the difficulty in Photo app. Then someone told me you can only do it inside an album or something like that. So yes I was able to do it today inside an album. Or maybe for collections of albums that I don't remember.... Anyway there are limitations on doing it.

Another one I found is in doing it with something external. This last day or two I found that on a pen drive, and on a card reader this Caps or Command enables you to highlight several folders/files, but only one at a time. That is if I don't hold the key down and click one folder it is selected and highlighted, then I click in another folder and that is selected/highlighted but the first one becomes unselected. Whereas holding the key down both are selected. But the ones in between are not selected.

This is different from what I remember in Windows. You could select first and last and using Caps as explained everything in between was selected too. As far as I can remember I could do this on a pen drive and other external media as well as in all apps. It is annoying to not be able to. For instance today finding my camera card was full I wanted to delete 300 pics - later I'll want to delete a thousand. So it is annoying to have to mark them one by one.

I have also another question about this card reader experience. The card in my camera was full up, so I went to to delete about 20 or 30 pics, to create space for others I wanted to take immediately. I attached the card in the card reader to the Mac, saw the pics inside Finder, seected 20 or 30, clicked Trash and the little thumbnails vanished.. Then I took just two photos, and the camera told me it was full up again! So I'm wondering is this a bad way to do it, does this just mean I can't see the files any more, but they're not really deleted? (For the next two or 300 to be more sure I put the card back in the camera and used the camera's own routine to delete. That also involves marking them one by one, which, plus the fact that the camera and it's instructions are fiddly to find the way around in, was why I was trying for a more efficient method.)
...

 

[Cory Cooper]

Hello,

In OS X, you use the Shift and Command keys to click and select multiple items. Here are they key commands for selecting multiple files: OS X El Capitan: select files or folders.

After you clicked Trash on the card to delete the photos, did you empty the Trash as you would normally from your Mac;s hard drive. External drives/cards work the same - you move the files to the Trash, but you have to empty it to recover the space.

C

 

[evennewerbie]

I'm afraid for me that just does not work. Nor do the upper case key, or any combination I tried of that, Control, option, Command.

I found 'OS X El Capitan: select files or folders'
https://support.apple.com/kb/PH22047?locale=en_US&viewlocale=en_US

Contains the following two ways:

"Select multiple files or folders that are listed together: Click the first item you want to select, hold down the Shift key, then click the last item.
You can also click near the first item, hold down the mouse or trackpad button, then drag over all of the items.”

The first one does not work for me.

I found the second one did work. It is rather like highlighting a passage of text. I don't like it much because it's not so clean and easy as just clicking two boxes, especially when you don't know exactly beforehand where the second one is. Also it lacks precision. For example are arranged in Finder three in a row. But it is hard if not impossible to drag over exactly e.g. 3-7, I found I had to highlight the whole rows in in practice, so I get 1-10 highlighted, later at some stage I get rid of 1, 2,8,9 after transferring them all into Photos for instance. Or better I can delete all the whole rows, and then the ones I want at top and bottom individually as they will not be more than 4. Still for a large number of boxes it's better than selecting them all individually.

It will at least be a lot more convenient for deleting a large number of photos from my camera card. Better than clicking one by one in a rather fiddly process on the camera too. So I understand just whilst camera card is attached to the computer if I trash and then empty trash and whilst card still attached this will entirely delete them from my camera card?

Something tells me that I may have photos left on my card that I can't see because I trashed but didn't empty the trash can. Fortunately not very many. Is this possible,? And is there any way of seeing them, or getting rid of them anyway?

 

[evennewerbie]

I should have written "Or better I can select all the whole rows I want, and then the unwanted ones in top and bottom rows individually"

Doesn't seem possible to edit for very long after posting here.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

if there aren't many files/folders to be selected another way is to click  A

When all items are selected you can hold down the  key & click to deselect unwanted files/folders.

Or just click & hold the mouse down then drag around the files/folders you want.

 

[evennewerbie]

if there aren't many files/folders to be selected another way is to click  A

When all items are selected you can hold down the  key & click to deselect unwanted files/folders.

Or just click & hold the mouse down then drag around the files/folders you want.

Haven't been able to do either.

This is the Mac retina notebook, and there is no Apple key on it.

I have been unable to drag around files within Finder for example - if I click on one I can drag it, but as soon as I lift my finger from mouse It springs back to where It was. Or say I highlight 9 photo icons and I want to deselect the last one, by moving mouse I can only deselect the last column - nos. 3, 6 and 9.

I do not do fancy things yet with my photos, but I need to move around quite a large number of my snaps which I'm frightened of losing. So far my feeling with Mac which I have had for a year is that for managing photos it has taken me a step backwards. Last days I have read other comments on the web to the same effect.
But I have booked myself a lesson in the local Apple store next Tuesday.

 

[Spawn_Dooley]

This is the Mac retina notebook, and there is no Apple key on it.

The key will either have  or ⌘

 

[Cory Cooper]

The Command ⌘ key used to have the  on it.

C

 

[evennewerbie]

if there aren't many files/folders to be selected another way is to click  A

When all items are selected you can hold down the  key & click to deselect unwanted files/folders.

Or just click & hold the mouse down then drag around the files/folders you want.

The Command ⌘ key used to have the  on it.

C

Thank you both. Using this I was able a few minutes ago to select 8 new photos on my card and transfer them to Photos.